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So how do you get yourself off an addiction? The easiest solution is a substitute. People who try to stop smoking end up on vapes or perhaps electronic cigarettes, something that simulates the addiction while still not being the addiction, and eventually they don’t smoke anymore. So, I decided to try and get over my xbox withdrawals with my own little substitution; emulation.

DosBOX is the easiest. I’m running a mac with snow leopard, so I’ve been using a program called Boxer which is tremendous and works so well, and is so simple. While this was fun for a while, running games I had nostalgia goggles for from my childhood (prince of persia 1 & 2, sam & max, doom 2 and etc.), it ultimately wasn’t as gripping as I thought it’d be. So I went to the next level and downloaded some real emulators.

I’ve been doing mostly Genesis and Game Boy Advance, and that-especially GBA-has been a blast. Now, the real problem with emulation is it’s in a sort of grey area of legality. On one hand, how is a company going to attack you for using products they no longer make available to the public seeing as they’re “outdated” and unavailable to legally purchase easily anymore. Let’s face it, a lot of people don’t want to run the risk of buying some old gaming stuff off Ebay only to have it ship to them and find out it doesn’t really work all that well or dies soon after. Nobody really wants to take that risk. But that’s the argument; “If you’re not going to let me pay you to play it, then you shouldn’t be able to legally raise a stink against me for doing it another way.” If Nintendo made their old Game Boy stuff more easily available-either through the Wii store or the Wii-U Store or some other sort of downloadable shop like Steam for instance, where a lot of old content ends up-then people would gladly pay them to play the games. Let’s face it, old stuff didn’t need lots of buttons and whatnot. Game Boy, NES & SNES were all relatively simple button schemes that spanned two buttons (sometimes four), a D Pad and later on the GBA some triggers. That’s not hard to make work on a computer, obviously, because emulators do it, and shit you can even buy a USB controller to play them with so why not just release it on Steam (or make their own content delivery program) and get paid for it? People have a hard on for nostalgia, that’s why emulators exist to begin with, so they should embrace it because people WOULD pay.

But back to the subject at hand; while it’s fun, it’s not the same. It’s not the same as playing a current game on a more current console. It’s cured my jones a bit, but in the end, I still want my 360 back. I still want to play the games I was playing and frankly, the substitute is never as good as the habit itself, no matter how you slice it. Emulation is obviously more cost effective, but that’s besides the point. I still crave the good stuff…the real stuff…I…I…

I need to call my sponsor.

Maggie Rose is a 26 y/o transgirl. She currently lives with her girlfriend and their dog. Together they fight crime, put an end to injustice and sometimes do laundry. She is a writer because she has no other skills or applicable talents useable for monetary gain. She’s about to publish her first novel, “You Ruined Everything”, in 2015-2016.